Great Managers Part 2: Focus On Strengths
The Gallup State of the American Manager report suggests that people leave managers, not companies. This is alarming given that Gallup’s research reveals only 1 in 10 people possess a high talent to manage. Sheesh. The good news is, within that 10 percent, we can identify what good managers have a strong ability to do:
Build trust and dialogue with their people about both work and life away from the office
Coach and develop people by focusing on their strengths
Motivate every employee individually
Engage employees with a compelling vision
Create a culture of clear accountability
Put the right people in the right roles
Make decisions based on productivity, not politics
As a strengths coach, I know there is not a narrow set of themes to make a great manager. Rather, great managers are able to find ways to use their natural talent and developed strengths to accomplish the list above.
That’s the good news in all of this. I believe that the characteristics of a good manager are abilities that can be learned, invested in and improved. It’s true all managers have talent – no doubt about it – that’s how they were promoted to be a manager. However, far more often than not, the talent that got them there does not necessarily translate to being a manger of people.
Our mission at Ryan Church Consulting is to help people use their talent and strengths to improve workplace relationships. We have a strong bias that sustainable, high-performing, fun-at-work, stay-in-this-job-for-longer teams happen because of great relationships. Please join us on the blog to gain some insights about each of the points above as we journey toward becoming your company’s most valuable resource – a great manager.
Focus on Strengths
I recently facilitated a strengths offsite with a group of sales and technology professionals that was a gathering of people who were visibly competent, energized and eager. No doubt, they had all the perceptible ingredients to be the high-performing team that I understood them to be. It was a fun day.
And yet, when it came to really understanding their strengths, most team members had only a vague – almost ho-hum – understanding of their own talent.
This team seemed to know that it is a good team that can not only get the job done, but improve upon past results. Even with great success, however, it was a team subject to a subtle dysfunction that befalls a lot of good teams in the marketplace: It took it’s own talent for granted.
In Gallup’s recent report, bosses that played to a team’s strengths – their greatest natural talent – had teams that were nearly 40 percent more likely to be engaged at work. Based on the study’s clear findings that focusing on strengths is a far more successful engagement strategy, it was a natural recommendation to suggest that managers focus on the strengths, or positive characteristics, of those they manage as opposed to offering critique or focusing on the negative characteristics.
It seems simple enough to focus on strengths, right? So why does it seem to be such a struggle?
Here are a few suggestions to address the struggle and to focus on strengths:
Taking strengths for granted: It is so easy to assume that the things that come most naturally to us, the things that we do without even having to think much about it, are part of our "special sauce." In the offsite that I led, people were audibly asking for others to help them identify their greatest strengths because it was a common assumption for an individual to think everyone was good at the same things. Good managers takes time to notice and communicate to the people they lead the areas they observe great talent. This seems simple, but so many managers are moving so quickly to improve the bottom line that they neglect to pay the necessary attention to the talent on the team. Because our culture has spent so much time focusing on fixing our weaknesses, people are far better at identifying a lack of talent in themselves than they are at identifying areas of great or special talent.
Better words for strength and talent: We need to move past broad assertions that sound like, “She’s a people person,” or “He’s a numbers guy.” We need a language that gets far more granular. It’s true that someone might be a people person but we need to have a language that addresses what type of people person. We can say someone is great with numbers, but why are they are great with numbers? In what specific ways? This is arguably the greatest asset that Clifton StrengthsFinder provides for individuals and teams. Language is culture and the 34 themes, commonly referred to as strengths, provide that robust language that is needed for a strengths-based culture to stick.
Performance and Feeling: An easy mistake for managers to make is to assume that just because someone is good at something means that a particular task or activity is a strength. Often it is, but it's also important to understand that there is a difference between being good at something and having it be a strength. Someone might be an adequate, even high performer at a particular activity, but it might be something that totally wears them out and is ultimately unsustainable. Mangers need to check with high-performing members and ask how they felt about particular successes. Managers need to dive into the specifics about how they felt in the process of doing something, not just after a project is finished. So much of what I’ve discovered about leadership has to do with not making assumptions. High-performance and achieving goals requires the same level of curiosity that managers give struggling team members before and during a performance improvement plan. Managers need to be attentive to how their employees feel about various aspects of their job description because that is tied to who they are and, ultimately connected to an individual's engagement at work. Without engagement, an employee is not going to last long in the workplace.
Focusing on strengths as a manager is not merely NOT focusing on weaknesses. It is the intentional action to pay attention, develop a language, and discover more of the emotional connection that ultimately yields even better results.
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